ART-PRESENTATION: Claire Harvey-By the way

Using everyday and ephemeral expressive media: slides, tape, glass or post-its or painting directly on the gallery wall, the British artist Claire Harvey presents to us people busy with their daily activities which are apparently trivial ones but give us a feeling of surprise because their real meaning is concealed to us.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Fons Welters Archive

The characters in the work of Claire Harvey are anonymous people within an illusory environment and who behave as if there were alone. Her images are full of melancholy and loneliness, like the characters of the “Film noir” cinema. In her exhibition at the Galerie Fons Welters she presents three bodies of work. The “By the Way” postcards greet the visitor and provide a perfect introduction to the layers of surface, image and object in her work. The views from planes, trains, and buildings are the background, in which a figure, pre-painted on acetate, is inserted into the scene. We travel with unnatural ease through the regulated material of the postcard, passed the surface of the picture plane, through the camera’s lens, the figure’s acetate, and out the window frame. “Sticky water”, on the far side of the main gallery, presents a series of figures, painted on small strips of Scotch tape, stuck and spread across the wall. After closer inspection, every character is painted as if half submerged in water and placed as if receding into the distance. Beyond the surface of the wall, beyond even the white void through which they wade, these isolated figures create an entirely imaginary perspective plane into which they collectively navigate, as if drawn by a current towards an unknown vanishing point. On the opposing wall, “The Catch”, inhabited by a swirl of figures, as if swept up in a gust of wind, reflects and refracts some of the themes from Sticky water. The picture plane is now locked to the physical surface and the figures painted directly on the wall. Harvey’s artful compositions elegantly balance the real and illusory, the simultaneous suspension of disbelief and belief.

 

Info: By The Way, Galerie Fons Welters, Bloemstraat 140, Amsterdam, Duration: 5/9-17/10/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 13:00-18:00, www.fonswelters.nl